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Downtown Washington, D.C.'s Terrell Place is an office and retail complex named after civil rights activist Mary Church Terrell, a founding member of the NAACP, who led the protest against segregation at Hecht’s lunch counter in the 1950s.

Building owners, Beacon Capital asked ESI Design to transform the disjointed lobby, which is comprised of three connected components, including the former Hecht’s department store.

ESI’s designers unified the space by treating it as a single canvas.Installing large-scale diffused LED displays with reactive media on the lobby walls and corridor portals created a sense of connection across the building’s common areas. The content is activated by passersby via an infrared camera system.

The resulting scenes ebb and flow with the pedestrian traffic inside the lobby.At 80 feet wide x 13 feet high, the largest media wall is visible from the street through the oversize windows that were once the display windows of the department store.